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From transaction costs to transaction value: Overcoming the Coase-Williamson paradigm

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  • Frolov, Daniil

Abstract

The transaction cost economics has accumulated a mass of dogmatic concepts and assertions that have received high stability under the influence of path dependence. These include the dogma about transaction costs as frictions, the dogma about the unproductiveness of transactions as a generator of losses, Stigler-Coase theorem and the logic of transaction cost minimization, the dogma about the priority of institutions providing low-cost transactions. The listed dogmas underlie the prevailing tradition of transactional analysis – the Coase-Williamson paradigm – which, in turn, is the foundation of neo-institutional theory. Therefore, the community of new institutionalists implicitly block attempts of a serious revision of this dogmatics. The purpose of the article is to substantiate a post-institutional (alternative to the dominant institutional discourse) perspective for the development of transactional studies based on rethinking and combining forgotten theoretical alternatives. We are talking about Commons’s theory of transactions, Wallis-North’s theory of transaction sector and Zajac-Olsen’s theory of transaction value. The article provides arguments and examples in favor of the broader explanatory possibilities of post-institutional transactional analysis.

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  • Frolov, Daniil, 2019. "From transaction costs to transaction value: Overcoming the Coase-Williamson paradigm," MPRA Paper 95959, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:95959
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    institutions; institutional complexity; transactions; transaction costs; transaction value; post-institutionalism;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • B4 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - Economic Methodology
    • B52 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - Current Heterodox Approaches - - - Historical; Institutional; Evolutionary; Modern Monetary Theory;

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